So inspired by recent popular epistemology on twitter, I wondered, how would I establish that you shouldn’t inject bleach while entirely staying in my lane, i.e. only speaking where I had previously established authority, rather than claiming it with my speech

And I flatter myself that I have some reputation in American cultural history, so I figured I would talk about the 19th century antiseptic revolution and the 20th century antibiotic revolution in medicine, how they were both necessary for the mid-20th Golden Age of Surgery and modern medicine generally but if internal disinfection with antiseptics worked antibiotics wouldn’t have been so important

(I would have digressed about Listerine and the invention of “halitosis” and the whole institution of the vaginal douche, about the dawn of advertising as a meaning-making force and OTC pharmaceuticals as Industrial Age folk medicine and about the liminal and shifting statuses of the mouth and vagina – between interior and exterior, purpose and pleasure, for self or for others. Then I’d be tempted to talk about the “water cure” fad for enemas, but then that ties into the contemporary discovery of nutrition and digestion and it’s a lot.)